In the immediate sense, I'd say that it was obviously the injury to Rondo. If we were going to beat the Heat, it was going to take the best of Rondo, and Rondo HAD been warming to the task, starting in the second half of game two. But Dwayne Wade showed that the NBA is now a league where you win by intentionally taking out the opposing team's best player. Anyone think he'll try that stunt on Derrick Rose? Probably that would be too obvious, and plus, Rose is physically stronger than Rondo, and plus, the league will protect Rose where they refused to protect Rondo and the Celtics (letting Wade tee off all series), so maybe not. But who knows? He got away with it once, and might think he can do it again.
The overarching factor was, equally obviously, I'd say, The Trade. It seems impossible to count the ways that The Trade was a ghastly disaster.
For starters, because of The Trade, we lost our starting center. Our main advantage over the Heat, apart from Rondo, was the power coming from our bigs. If we had had Perkins starting and the O'Neils coming off the bench we would have dominated the Heat down low, and we needed to do that. Instead, we were reduced to trying to turn Garnett into a dominant low post presence. That's never been his game. He's capable of being a low post force as an extra thing, not as the main thing.
And, we lost the anchor of our defense. People never get tired of saying that Perkins wouldn't have made a difference against the Heat, because they aren't powerful at center anyway. What a superficial way to think about defense that is! Our defense was predicated on the strong support at the center of it coming from Perkins; he was the (hulking) spider at the center of the web. Jermaine did what he could to replace Perk's defense, but he's just not a starting center anymore. Perkins was the key piece of our defensive puzzle; not a spectacular defender, but a necessary one. Rondo, for example, is able to gamble more freely on defense when he knows that the Big Guy is back there. And while our defense was still pretty good without Perkins, but it wasn't the crushing force it had once been.
Of course, folks love to point out that we had a top record in the league without Perkins this year. That's true. Danny did a brilliant job of acquiring not one, but TWO late career HOF-type centers to cover for Perk, while he was gone. And Shaq and Jermaine, in turn, did a brilliant job of covering for Perkins, early in the season, even though they had to tag-team it, depending on which one was more healthy, from game to game. It took a LOT to cover for Perk, which shows how important he really was to us, and thank goodness he came back as soon as he did, because, by the time Perkins came back, both O'Neils were pretty much down for the count (though they both did their valiant best to come back for the playoffs [and Jermaine remarkably successfully, or else we probably wouldn't have gotten as far as we did]).
Basically, trading Perkins contradicted what had appeared to be DANNY'S OWN PLAN for how the season would work out. As I understood it, the plan initially was for Shaq and Jermaine to cover for Perkins until he came back, and then to play backup/stopgap roles. Why didn't Danny stick to this plan? I'm pretty sure we would have rolled right through the Heat with Perkins starting and the O'Neils coming off the bench. According to Danny, it was because we desperately needed someone to cover for Marquise Daniels, but that never made a bit of sense. You don't fix a hole on your bench by making a hole in your starting lineup. That doesn't even begin to make sense. Folks have also claimed that Danny wanted to enhance our athleticism. But how can making us extremely old and extremely gimpy at center possibly enhance our athleticism? The only way it could do that would be if Jeff Green was some kind of all-star type player.
And, of course, that brings us to Jeff Green. I like Green. I think he can be a nice player for us, possibly, some day. But it was delusional in the extreme to think that he was going to come to the Celtics and instantly be a major factor for us. The best thing on his resume is scoring, and he's not exactly a barnburner there. People just seemed obsessed with the fact that he was a lottery choice. They rubbed on that thought like it was a rabbit's foot, like it would make his anaemic play turn into dynamic rock-the-world-off-the-bench play.
Perhaps trading Perkins for Green could have been justified had it been done after the season was over. After all, the argument could be made that we had no chance to re-sign Perkins, and that by trading him, we'd at least get something for him. It was all too obvious that the main reason Danny made The Trade was to unload Perkins as a potential contract problem; Danny even admitted this, in a rare moment of candor, saying that he probably wouldn't have made the deal if Perkins had re-signed. But how can anyone possibly justify making such a trade, based on contract concerns, just as the team entered the homestretch hot in pursuit of a championship? I thought the Celtics weren't like other teams, that the Celtics way involved putting winning first, and winning championships first of all.
And that brings us to what are often called 'the intangibles'. Some of those intangibles are not very intangible. For example, when Danny decided to not only make The Trade, but several other deals as well, he brought about such wholesale changes to the lineup, that the season was basically set back to preseason. We became a team that had to relearn the plays, re-establish chemistry, etc., etc., with just a month to go in the season and seeding on the line!!!! How crazy was that? No one else in the league was going to wait until we had a chance to figure it all out. In fact, Rondo had to beg Doc to simplify the playbook going into the playoffs (having lost our first seed); that's how bad it was.
Is it even possible to overestimate how crazy it is to reset the personnel of a team that is LEADING the championship hunt, on the verge of the playoffs?
Other intangibles are more actually intangible than the team not knowing the playbook, but they can be even more important. What are these Celtics without Ubuntu? And how were they supposed to maintain the intensity of their 'ubuntu' when a guy widely acknowledged as the emotional heart of the team was suddenly sent packing? The team was obviously really hurt by this, and I think it's amazing how well they recovered. It just wasn't enough. Nowhere near enough.
This can't be overemphasized. The special spirit these Celtics had AS A TEAM made ubuntu famous. It was their secret weapon. Every team they faced knew that they could never quite achieve the cohesion that the Celtics could rise to. The Trade changed that.
And how were the players supposed to react to the way the Team front office demonstrated a lack of commitment to winning a championship, when they made a trade that was obviously about avoiding a contract dispute? How could Doc and Danny tell them that 'it's all about winning', when it manifestly WASN'T?! Athletes aren't idiots. They can read between the lines just as well as anyone else.
With a month to go in the season, a leading championship contender should be working on pulling it all together, in order to peak for the playoffs. But the Celtics were trying to figure out how to piece it all together, because of The Trade. There's a world of difference between those two things. And some players were more confused than others. Paul Pierce, I think, didn't have to change a whole lot. But Ray Allen now had a little more difficulty running off picks and screens. The timing wasn't quite the same, and Allen is, if nothing else, the preeminent timing player. Garnett found himself unexpectedly thrust into the role of being the team's main force down low. KG has always been a guy on the move, a guy who can power down low, slip outside, set screens, make passes: Mr. Mercurial. Big Baby is a guy who likes to know his role. He'd become very comfortable with being the team's sixth man. Now it looked to him like Jeff Green was brought in to be sixth man. Why on earth is anyone surprised that Davis began to 'lose himself', as he himself put it? He became confused about what aspects of his game to emphasize and began forcing his shooting. Is he really to blame?
And then there was Rondo. Much has been said about Rondo missing Perkins. Even so, it's probably been underestimated. Rondo brings to the game of basketball a unique blend of emotion and intellect. He's hypersensitive, brainy and intuitive. How many times have we seen him charging to the defense of his Bigs? Of course he missed, Perkins, a lot. A lot.
But there's more to it. Losing Perkins changed the age balance on the team. We went from being a team with a top six composed of three grizzled vets and three young players, to a team with a top four or five, depending on Jermaine's health, composed of Rondo and a bunch of vets. Rondo was already having trouble establishing himself as the team's leader before The Trade. After The Trade, he really had no chance at all. He became the odd man out.
In general, The Trade made the Celtics a FAR older team, even though Perk and Green and Nate and Nenad are all fairly young players. A lot of folks are claiming that we were destined to lose to the Heat because they are so athletic. Well, the Heat ARE athletic, obviously, but we weren't an unathletic team. We were an OLD team, and The Trade made us a lot older.
In so many ways, the Trade was one of the most insane things I've ever seen in sports. I think it is an immense tribute to the Big Four and to the team that they made it as far into the playoffs as they did.
Why did we lose to the Heat? The immediate reason was the Wade takedown of Rondo, and the larger reason was The Trade.
Topic: Why did the Celtics lose to the Heat? (merged) (Read 21492 times)